First off, congratulations to the team on pulling though a difficult development cycle! I really would not have guessed it was such a struggle, but I think the quality of the finished work is clear and I hope it feels like it justifies the pain, lol.
Second, congrats on putting together a thorough post-mortem. There’s a lot to dig into here as a somewhat experienced writer who has basically no experience with collaborative writing. Both in terms of documenting different approaches and also the process of negotiating said differences. (And it doesn’t hurt that there’s like a dozen works discussed here that I’m interested in checking out, lol).
I definitely sympathize with the fears surrounding involving such a young character. I think it goes without saying that Han-byeol’s chapter was absolutely fascinating, as was her attempt to make sense of and do right in the world, and the work is definitely better for her inclusion. I was similarly terrified as I was putting together Bernadette, especially because I felt it was absolutely necessary to depict the “something terrible”s and, similarly, the protagonist’s complicated and controversial response(s) to them. (I’ve yet to read Nabokov’s work; instead, Tampa was a primary influence.)
My defense was to stress the autobiographical nature of the work, because if bad things happened to me, I’m allowed to tell stories based on them, right? But that resulted in responses to the work that were tinged with more pity than I’d prefer (although I am delighted that, in general, readers brought a great deal of nuance with them). This is all to say I hope nobody has given y’all a hard time over this. Apart from that one comment, which, lol.
Something else I found interesting was the decision to (or necessity of?) have the story firmly in place before the other assets were worked on. I think it makes a lot of sense; audiovisual components can be very demanding on time and energy, and one wants nothing to go to waste, but I find it necessary to work on backgrounds and music mid-draft a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s to get a sense of place, sometimes to depict a feeling visually so as to inform the writing. But I imagine that runs the risk of depleting time and energy before the project is complete, or just crossing up a lot of wires.
Anyway, really cool write-up! Thanks for the VN, and for the debrief!